The long winter of Arthur Lydiard

By MICHELE HEWITSON

That was a bloody long run. Legendary athletics coach Arthur Lydiard has finally made it across a finish line many might think he should have crossed decades ago. This week he was made a life member of Athletics New Zealand.

Life membership? "You're 86," I remind him unnecessarily. He cackles away. "Yeah. Ha, ha. Oh well, they thought, 'Give it to the old bastard. He must just about be going out of the place now.'"

This is Lydiard, grinning away impishly under the sun umbrella on the deck of his house in sleepy Beachlands, doing his valiant best to pretend to be delighted at the honour.

Lydiard, not exactly known for his diplomatic skills, really is trying. Because you can't help wondering whether he might have been tempted, for a hot moment, to have said to Athletics NZ: thanks very much, but no thanks.

"No, no," he says, "I don't want to get on the wrong side of people any more. I used to be on the wrong side of them all the time."

He adds: "Well, you know, they're different people now. They used to give me trouble. They wouldn't stir to help me but they put hurdles in my road."

The hurdle in Lydiard's road these days is age. The knees on which he has run many thousands of kilometres are bung. They are made of titanium and plastic. He didn't run them into the ground: he stuffed one helping a mate drop a 163kg pipe into a drain. He had an aneurism in the other.

He has suffered three small strokes and lives a life of not so quiet frustration. He has to ask for our help to put the umbrella up - he hates having to do so.

The day before we went to visit, he fell over in the garden.

"It was a hell of a job to get up."

With his wife away in hospital, he thought he might be stuck outside for the night. He managed to pull himself up. The story is told not to demonstrate his dodderiness but to prove his doggedness.

This is the story of his life and it is both a matter of some pride and not a little sadness.

Lydiard is nothing if not determined. The man who trained our greatest runners was never great himself. "I got there. I was very tenacious." He won two New Zealand marathons but "I never had the ability. I could win a track race on occasion - when it was my turn."

His turn, in terms of recognition from the national sporting body, has been a long time coming.

Lydiard's initial response, and fair enough too, was that he was not "overly elated". Such restraint.

We decide to have a toast anyway. Lydiard has put a bottle of Collards Viognier in the fridge for the occasion of the interview. He'd offered a tipple when we arrived at 2.30pm. But I'd missed the cue.

At 3pm he says - his cue being that we have been talking about how his athletes would run 22 miles every Sunday then sink "a quart" of beer - "I was going to offer you a lovely dry white. You can still have one if you want."

So we do. And very nice it is too.

Lydiard may have needed help with the brolly but he can still wield a corkscrew with authority.

He didn't make it to the dinner where his life membership was announced.

He is not particularly interested in awards. Years ago, after his second wife died of cancer, he cleared out his trophy cabinet.

"Bloody silver," he says. His second wife, Eira - "my Finnish wife" - used to clean the cups. After her death, "I thought, I'm not going to clean the bloody things so I put them all in a sack and took them out to the tip. No one's interested in bloody cups."

But the real reason he didn't turn up to have his great honour bestowed upon him is that it is hard for him to get around.

And he has other priorities. This week he went out and bought himself a walker. On Tuesday morning he got up early and went down to Papakura athletics track and pushed the thing around for half an hour.

He is trying to get his knees working. His calf muscles, he says, bashing the wooden outdoor table, "are as stiff as this board".

Lydiard laments his lack of fitness. He loves being fit; loves running.

His lower limbs retain the memory of all that running. When he begins his painful-to-watch shuffle of a walk, his legs go up and down, up and down in a strange sort of running-on-the-spot dance. The urge to run and run is still there, an itch he can no longer scratch.

So I ask him, silly me, whether he dreams of running. "No, I only dream about women now." Wink, wink.

There are other itches. The coach who trained Peter Snell and Murray Halberg to gold at the 1960 Rome Olympics - his athletes' total haul over the years was 18 Olympic medals - has always been an outsider. He went to Rome, not in an official capacity, but thanks to a whip-around by his supporters.

In 1961 when he was "supposed to be the best coach in the world", Lydiard was working as a milkman.

He insists there is, has never been, time for bitterness. But "when I came back with those athletes with the gold medals those guys [the athletics administrators] never came near me. Never said - except Jim Bellwood who trained Yvette Williams - congratulations."

He claims such carry-on - or complete lack of carry-on - never worried him. "I wanted to see my athletes win, that's what drove me on."

He claims that since his stroke names often elude him: it is telling that he remembers Bell's.

Something that should not be forgotten about Lydiard, he's the guy who invented jogging. Jogging, I say, what a scam, you made it sound like a fun thing to do.

He gets a good laugh out of that. He is very good at entertaining with stories about the pain of running: "It can feel like a red-hot poker down your throat."

Still, getting people out on to the footpaths in running gear is what he is most proud of. That, not the medal haul is, by his own estimation, his greatest achievement: "Getting hold of an obese, neurotic man who couldn't stop smoking, couldn't stop drinking and turning him into a fit person."

He is content now. If still bemused about why he was so thoroughly ignored by the athletics establishment in his own country while being revered overseas.

He's given up wondering about it. "You tell me," he shrugs. Still, those hurts sometimes rise to the surface. Athletics, for all the thanks he got for it, "cost me my family in the finish".

Lydiard says he had to leave the country to "get the bloody money, didn't I?" His first wife hated living in outlandish places like Mexico and Finland. It was all right for him, he says, the language of athletics is the same worldwide.

His eldest son doesn't speak to him and he says he doesn't know why. This is an added hurt because Lydiard's father "buggered off" shortly after telling the 15-year-old Lydiard he had to leave school and get a job. He never saw his father again.

But he cheers up talking about his third marriage. He has been married for five years to "a lovely girl", Joelyne. She is 38 to his 86.

He "couldn't give a stuff what people think," about the age difference - or anything else. "It's what I think about them that counts with me."

And what does the great coach, the man who lived to run, think about when he's down on the field where he once ran, pushing his walker?

He thinks: "Get the bloody thing done."